Financial Independence for the Blind

Can a Blind Person become Financially Independent?

I am looking into gaining some financial independence. From today, October 10, 2019, I will attempt to build a nest egg for retirement. I am starting  from just $50.

Cash.

The aim is to build this $50 up to over $10,000 initially. Taking some earnings from the occassional sale of items on amazon, some cash I save from housekeeping and daily expenses. It won't be easy. I plan on growing most of the  nest egg in a brokerage account. This will use cash, stocks in individual companies, exchange traded funds (ETF's) and mutual funds. I will share each step at least once per month, and give you the basics so you can follow and even try for yourself.

Why am I starting with such a small amount?   

I am starting with just $50 because it is an amount many of us can afford. We can all save $50 to start investing. The starting point in itself does not matter. What matters is where we end up.

Fifty dollars is also about the minimum amount that you can begin to invest effectively. It means that we cannot invest in a portfolio of amazon stock just yet. But we can invest in some property in the for or Real Estate Investment Trusts (REIT) and some nice low cost mutual funds.

To make this investment account more productive you could open this in a Roth IRA within the United States, that would allow you to grow the account tax free, but it is only available if you have earned income and you are funding the account from tax paid funds. Since many blind and visually impaired persons do not have jobs then such accounts are not available, plus any readers outside the U.S. may not have access to tax efficient accounts, so I want to keep this real. Not pie in the sky as can be found in so many quarters of the investment market.

So first I will go with an E*Trade brokerage account, I am familiar with their platform, it works well with my screen reader (NVDA) and best of all offers all kinds of investment types plus no-brokerage fees.

I will be staying away from things like options and futures trading. They are too complex for me to understand so I avoid dabbling in areas of the stock market that I do not understand.


A good book to start with basic investing knowledge is  Stock Investing for Dummies







But their are many more such books available:





I also like to listen to my Kindle books and podcasts about investing on my Echo "Alexa" device.
 The echo has good sound and it has a good interface where you can just say "Alexa, read my latest kindle book." or "Alexa, play Stacking Benjamins podcast."

So here it is a new series of blogs. Please follow this blog to read the latest updates on this series and other posts.

You may like to read my two year update on Financial Independence for the Visually Impaired here.

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